As integrated circuits become more sophisticated, the design of the circuit is becoming more complex. While electronic design automation (EDA) tools are available to assist in the design of these complex circuits, these EDA tools still require a great deal of intensive labor from design engineers. In addition, the EDA tools tend to generate a large amount of data that design engineers must manually sift through.
Many Intellectual Property (IP) cores included in the system designs have a control and status interface that consists of a number of registers. Even with the multitude of EDA tools available, there is no standardized format of specifying these registers and building the register transfer logic (RTL) to implement the registers.
As a result, there is a need to standardize the specification of the control and status registers of IP blocks so that additional functionality may be applied to enhance the design process.